Friendship Bracelets
by berry-cool
Summary: K-2SO and Cassian Andor. A brilliant partnership, but sometimes, it's not always smooth sailing. Part of Rogue One: Encore, but no prior reading is necessary. Inspired by the recent Marvel Cassian & K-2SO one-shot.


K-2SO remembered a lot. He supposed once upon a time he would have been able to use the word _everything_ as opposed to the comparatively mediocre term _a lot_ , but he didn't want to be inaccurate.

It was, in many ways, a very ordinary day. He had a brief power-down period when most of the organic life species on the bast were asleep, and powered up again before everyone was awake. Cassian and himself had returned from a recent trip, and neither of them had serious errands to do: so Kay had just stood vigil outside Cassian's quarters for something to occupy himself with. After about an hour he found that boring, so Kay wandered around the base, observing a variety of people running around with varying levels of interest. Sometimes he told people if what they were doing had less than fifty-percent chance of succeeding: but after a while that was no longer interesting.

Now it was almost midday, and he had not seen Cassian all day. Usually that wasn't necessarily a problem: but today of all days, the fact he hadn't seen his friend was getting somewhat under his… metal.

For Kay did remember _a lot_ and that _a lot_ included most of the day that he and Cassian met for the first time. Part of that reprogramming meant that Kay's memory of his life beforehand was vaguely hazy, but he did remember blinking, being shot at a lot, and knowing that he had to help this short (all humans were short, really) human escape from some other humans wearing flimsy looking white armour.

Since then, they had been friends, and Kay trusted that they were as such. This year was the second anniversary of that day and Kay found it throughly suspect that he hadn't seen Cassian at all. He ran through the memories logged into his database until it got to precisely the same day the year before.

"Let's take a flight to Hoth," Cassian had said.

Kay remembered looking at his friend as though he were mad.

"Hoth is a notoriously inhospitable and cold planet, Captain. I think it would be unwise -"

"Come on, Kay."

They had landed on a remote part of the planet and Cassian had bundled up himself in thick layers. The two of them had sat in the snow and Kay had tried for several minutes to figure out what on earth they were doing there.

"It is good that there is no blizzard at the moment, Captain," Kay remembered himself finally saying. "Hoth has blizzards occurring over 92.4% of the time. It was lucky that you picked the lower region of -"

"It wasn't luck, Kay," Cassian had said. "I had assessed it for a while."

"Oh," said Kay. "That was very sensible."

After a few moments Kay saw Cassian reach into his knapsack and take out a small flask.

"I know you can't drink," said the Captain quietly. "But I thought I could drink for the both of us."

"I am not sure -"

"When I was a kid I had a two best friends. One of them: her name was Matea. My home planet was so hot and all she dreamed of was to get away, somewhere completely different. You can imagine the look on her face when she heard about Hoth! Snow for days… she used to talk about the snowpeople she would make and the tauntauns she would ride and… I don't know what happened to her after… after I had to leave my home. Think of my surprise when I learn that the Rebellion has been setting up base here."

"We have not been transferred to the Hoth base yet Captain Andor," Kaytoo said.

"No we have not," Cassian had replied. "But I wanted to come here either way, and the Princess said it was alright."

Next to him Cassian raised the glass in his hand.

"I don't know if you're aware, my friend, but it is a year to the day we first met. You have been a good friend to me: I cannot think of a better way to remember an old friend that honouring her memory alongside a new one."

For once Kaytoo had been speechless. He had had some idea that it had been a year since their first meeting, but at the same time he had not thought anything of it, had ignored the anniversaries of organic life-forms he had seen celebrated by virtue of the fact that he was of course, not an organic life form. But the memory had lodged deep somewhere in his databank, and the fact that no Cassian was nowhere to be seen therefore worried him.

The droid did not see the Captain all day and even made efforts to wander around the base for him before deciding to power down in the hangar. He was in the midst of fairly blissful inconsequential data processing when he felt a figure tapping him on his head.

"What on earth is going on?" he said, flickering awake.

The Captain, his eyes tired, stood standing in front of him. Then he stepped forward and placed what looked like a skinny leather coil around Kaytoo's left wrist and fastened it there.

"I asked Jyn for advice," he said. "And Baze too. Then I had to actually make it. It took time."

Kaytoo reached down to the touch the tightly knotted cord with his right hand. He looked up. Cassian was holding up his arm, with a similar looking cord wrapped around it.

"Baze said the whole idea was that we both had one. Jyn said they are called friendship bracelets but I'm going to pretend I never heard that term of reference."

Kaytoo looked back down. Cassian nodded at him, a nod that was swift but had all the meaning Kaytoo knew it needed to contain. Then the Captain quietly walked away.

As the droid saw his friend's retreating back he called out.

"Thank you, for reprogramming me that day," he said. "I probably was not so nice beforehand."

The Captain turned and gave a small smile. Kaytoo pushed on.

"Though I also am going to pretend that I never made any of those admissions."

Cassian nodded at the droid once more, and the droid returned the gesture. He settled back into his power down position and looked down at the cord again. He had new friends now, many new friends. But there was always the one that came first.


End file.
